In February 2022, as Russian forces advanced on Kyiv, Ukraine’s government faced a critical vulnerability: with its Internet and communication networks under attack, its troops and leaders would soon be in the dark. Elon Musk—the de facto head of Tesla, SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter), xAI, the Boring Company, and Neuralink—stepped in. Within days, SpaceX had deployed thousands of Starlink terminals to Ukraine and activated satellite Internet service at no cost. Having kept the country online, Musk was hailed as a hero.
But the centibillionaire’s personal intervention—and Kyiv’s reliance on it—came with risks. Months later, Ukraine asked SpaceX to extend Starlink’s coverage to Russian-occupied Crimea, to enable a submarine drone strike that Kyiv wanted to carry out against Russian naval assets. Musk refused—worried, he said, that this would cause a major escalation in the war. Even the Pentagon’s entreaties on behalf of Ukraine failed to convince him. An unelected, unaccountable private citizen had unilaterally thwarted a military operation in an active war zone while exposing the fact that governments had remarkably little control over crucial decisions affecting their citizens and national security.
This was “technopolarity” in action: a technology leader not only driving stock market returns but also controlling aspects of civil society, politics, and international affairs that have been traditionally the exclusive preserve of nation-states. Over the past decade, the rise of such individuals and the firms they control has transformed the global order, which had been defined by states since the Peace of Westphalia enshrined them as the building blocks of geopolitics nearly 400 years ago. For most of this time, the structure of that order could be described as unipolar, bipolar, or multipolar, depending on how power was distributed among countries. The world, however, has since entered a “technopolar moment,” a term I used in Foreign Affairs in 2021 to describe an emerging order in which “a handful of large technology companies rival (states) for geopolitical influence.” Major tech firms have become powerful geopolitical actors, exercising a form of sovereignty over digital space and, increasingly, the physical world that potentially rivals that of states.
In 2021, the power of those companies seemed poised to grow, and over the last three years, it has. I argued that governments would not go down without a fight, and in the time since, their struggle for control over digital space has intensified. But the balance of power between technology firms and states has shifted in some surprising ways. What is emerging as a result of this contest is not quite any of the scenarios I originally envisioned—neither a globalized digital order, in which tech companies wrested control of digital space from the state, nor a U.S.-Chinese tech cold war, in which governments reasserted authority over the digital realm, nor a fully technopolar world, in which Westphalian state dominance gave way to a new order led by tech firms.
Instead of a clean triumph of states over firms or vice versa, the future is taking on a more hybrid form—a bifurcated system pitting a technopolar United States, where private tech actors increasingly shape national policy, against a statist China, where the government has asserted total control over its digital space. Most of the rest of the world is under pressure to reluctantly align with one pole or the other, but with both models offering little in the way of democratic accountability and individual freedom, the choice is less stark than it may seem. As tech power and state power fuse everywhere, the question is no longer whether tech companies will rival states for geopolitical influence; it is whether open societies can survive the challenge.
Technopolar Consolidation
In late 2021, the tech industry was riding high. Companies that controlled major technology platforms were at the zenith of their power. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg promised to create a fully immersive parallel “metaverse” free from real-world and government constraints, and cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum were starting to go mainstream, promising a viable decentralized alternative to governments’ authority over financial and payment systems. The COVID-19 pandemic had forced people to spend more time online than ever before, cementing tech’s influence as digital platforms became essential for work, education, entertainment, and interpersonal connection.
This period accelerated the adoption of digital tools and made tech companies even more central to private, social, economic, and civic life. As the world grew ever more dependent on digital connectivity, decisions made in corporate boardrooms—about what products to launch, how algorithms worked, and what rules and regulations to enforce—determined much of what billions of people saw and heard, shaped their opportunities, and even rewired their thought patterns.
But Big Tech companies didn’t just become more autonomous masters of their virtual walled gardens. They also expanded their influence in the physical realm, with their products and services becoming critical infrastructure. Data centers, cloud computing systems, satellite networks, semiconductors, and cybersecurity tools increasingly underpinned the operation of national economies, militaries, and governments.
This shift was on full display in the early days of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. If American companies such as SpaceX, Microsoft, and Palantir hadn’t chosen to leap to Ukraine’s defense—enabling communication, repelling cyberattacks, analyzing intelligence, and powering drones—Russia could have knocked the country offline, decapitated its command structure, and seized the capital. Ukraine might have lost the war within days.
No longer content to transcend the state, techno-utopians now seek to capture it.
But it wasn’t long before governments realized that what technologists giveth, they can as easily taketh away. The Starlink-Crimea episode—and the pandemic-era supply shortages before it—exposed the fragility created by reliance on a few dominant companies for key services and supplies. A single point of failure, or a single CEO’s decision, could have catastrophic consequences.
Faced with these risks, states struck back. In 2022, a wave of legislation and regulatory action targeted Big Tech on issues such as market power, content moderation, user protection, and data privacy. The EU passed the landmark Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, some of the most ambitious efforts to constrain tech power anywhere. The United States advanced high-profile antitrust cases, congressional oversight efforts, and state-level privacy rules. India, South Africa, and others followed suit, while the EU, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and others took more aggressive enforcement action against big platforms. But these rearguard actions did little to dent Big Tech’s control of the digital space, where they—not governments—continued to act as the primary architects, actors, and enforcers.
Big Tech’s power deepened further in late 2022 with the debut of large language models and the subsequent explosion of artificial intelligence—a breakthrough technology that has entrenched the tech industry’s lead over nation-states. The development and deployment of advanced AI systems demands immense computational power, vast data troves, and specialized engineering talent—resources concentrated in a handful of firms. These entities alone determine and understand (most of) what their models can do, and how, where, and by whom they are used. Even if regulators could design adequate governance regimes to contain the technology as it currently exists, AI’s exponential pace of advancement would quickly render them obsolete.
As AI becomes more powerful and more central to economic, military, and geopolitical competition, the tech firms that control it will grow even more geopolitically influential.
Revenge of the Nation-State
But as tech companies expanded their influence, traditional geopolitics came roaring back. Rising protectionism fueled by a populist backlash to globalization, a post-pandemic push for economic security reinforced by the shock of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and, above all, intensifying U.S.-Chinese strategic rivalry converged to shatter the illusion of a global tech ecosystem.
In Washington, an effort to limit China’s technological development began with targeted export and investment controls on a narrow set of strategically sensitive advanced technologies—a “small yard, high fence” approach, as the Biden administration framed it. But the campaign soon widened into an ever-expanding domain of restrictions on a vast array of goods that could be considered dual-use. Even mundane data became a national security concern, as did the apps and devices that generate it. Everything from social media to electric vehicles to fitness trackers was pulled into the vortex of “de-risking,” as U.S. policymakers scrambled to limit China’s access to anything that could give Beijing an edge in technological competition. Economic and security interests became indistinguishable, and technological fragmentation—if not outright decoupling from China—became the norm.
Meanwhile, industrial policy made a comeback as Western governments poured billions into subsidy programs to build strategic capabilities at home. Those carrots, however, came with sticks: build at home and leave China, or miss out on U.S. government largess. As Washington imposed limits on semiconductors and AI tools and Beijing tightened control over its critical minerals, supply chains balkanized and cross-border data flows slowed.
This unraveling of digital and physical globalization has since undermined the globalist business model adopted by firms such as Apple and Tesla, which relied on open markets and integrated supply chains to maximize their global profits. Even before Trump’s return to office, many of these firms had begun “friend shoring” some of their operations, shifting them from China to countries such as India, Mexico, and Vietnam to hedge against rising geopolitical risk. Last month, however, Trump announced massive tariffs that would hit allies and adversaries alike. The move signaled Washington’s retreat from globalization and dealt a blow to the globalist paradigm. By contrast, so-called national champions, such as Microsoft and Palantir, now find themselves in a new golden hour, able to leverage their long-standing alignment with the U.S. government to thrive in a fractured, post-globalization environment.
Washington’s statist turn has been more surprising but far less complete than Beijing’s. Since 2020, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cracked down on the Alibaba CEO Jack Ma, whom officials believed had grown too powerful and independent, Beijing has reasserted total control over its tech sector. Today, even China’s largest tech firms—regardless of their formal ownership structure—serve at the pleasure of President Xi Jinping, and the question of who controls China’s digital future has been decisively answered: the state.
From Libertarians to Leviathans
In the West, the answer to that question is still up for grabs. Complicating matters is the fact that it is not only control of digital space that is unsettled; it is control of the state itself.
A subset of Silicon Valley visionaries such as Musk, Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen once saw technology not just as a business opportunity but as a revolutionary force—one capable of liberating society from the limits of government and ultimately rendering the state obsolete. These “techno-utopians,” as I defined them in 2021, were skeptical of politics and “look(ed) to a future in which the nation-state paradigm that has dominated geopolitics since the seventeenth century has been replaced by something different altogether.”
But in recent years, some of these figures have taken a techno-authoritarian turn. No longer content to transcend the state, they now seek to capture it—repurposing public power to advance private ambitions. Part of this shift has been self-interested, driven by a desire to secure favorable regulations, tax breaks, and public contracts, as the wealthy and special interests in America often try to do. But it also reflects the rising stakes and changing balance of technological power in a geopolitically contested era.
Unlike earlier digital platforms, which blossomed under minimal government intervention, most of today’s frontier technologies—such as aerospace, AI, biotech, energy, and quantum computing—actively require implicit or explicit state backing to scale up. As these domains grew central to U.S.-Chinese competition and national security engulfed more of the digital realm itself, alignment with Washington evolved from a nuisance into a strategic necessity, making the techno-utopian vision less viable—and the national champion model more attractive. The incentives for state capture soared along with the spoils of it.
Yet for some, the choice of state capture wasn’t only pragmatic—it was also ideological. Several prominent tech figures, most notably Musk and Thiel, have embraced an antidemocratic worldview. They see American governance (and republican governance more generally) as irreparably broken, and its pluralism, checks and balances, and professional civil service as bugs, not features. These figures want the U.S. government to be run like a startup, with an unelected “national CEO” wielding concentrated power in the name of technological progress. In their view, control of the state—and the future—should shift to self-anointed techno-elites who are fit to lead the country through an era of exponential change. Thiel declared as early as 2009 that he no longer believed “freedom and democracy are compatible.” In 2023, Musk called for a “modern day Sulla,” referring to the Roman dictator whose reign was credited with the collapse of the republic.
Although he may have been joking at the time, Musk has in fact spent the past four months attempting to seize the reins of the U.S. government. But this is not a hostile takeover, as some have characterized it. It’s a leveraged buyout. Musk alone spent nearly $300 million to help elect Trump and a Republican Congress in 2024—not including the cost of remaking X into a pro-Trump social media platform. In return, the most transactional president in American history rewarded the world’s richest man with unparalleled influence over the mightiest state on earth.
Trump was already predisposed toward crony capitalism. But in his second term, tech moguls haven’t just been empowered to shape policy—they have been invited to hire (or fire) their own regulators and write (or erase) their own rules. Since he was put in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and granted “root access” to federal government systems, Musk has purged tens of thousands of civil servants, installed loyalists across dozens of agencies, slashed congressionally appropriated funding, and acquired terabytes of confidential data belonging to millions of Americans.
He and many of his techno-authoritarian allies embedded throughout government have retained their private-sector roles despite conflicts of interest. These technologists now hold sway over federal personnel and policy—shaping rulemaking, regulatory enforcement, procurement, taxation, and subsidies, affecting not only their own firms but their rivals’ firms, as well. A recent Senate report estimated Musk’s financial gains from this arrangement at $2.37 billion, excluding the potential value of public contracts and competitive advantages that his newfound access could unlock.
The tech right’s alliance with Trump was always transactional, not ideological.
Already, there are reports that DOGE is collecting and consolidating troves of sensitive government data—tax filings, immigration databases, Social Security records, health information, and more—with the purported aim of uncovering “waste, fraud, and abuse” in federal spending to enhance government efficiency, especially when combined with AI tools. But with no legal firewall between Musk’s public role and private interests, there is no way to know whether he has already begun feeding this data into his company xAI’s proprietary AI models—and, if he has, whether the outputs will serve the public good or his own. This master dataset could generate significant productivity gains for the U.S. economy, which other countries would soon try to adopt themselves. It could also give him a decisive edge in the race to build superintelligent AI systems that no rival could match, enable new forms of consumer profiling and behavioral targeting, and tighten his grip on markets and platforms.
The implications go beyond self-enrichment. Once in place, the same algorithmic infrastructure that delivers economic advantage could be weaponized for political control. Whistleblowers allege that DOGE is using AI to flag anti-Musk and anti-Trump sentiment among civil servants, and IRS officials have resigned over the Trump administration’s plans to mine tax data to track immigrants. The danger isn’t exactly an American version of China’s CCP-run surveillance regime, which exists primarily to secure the party’s hold on power. What Musk might produce is something more diffuse: an algorithmically powered, decentralized surveillance network leveraging captured state power but infused with market incentives, built to advance the commercial and political interests of select technology owners.
To be clear, Big Tech’s grip on Washington may not be permanent. Musk has claimed that DOGE is a time-limited initiative, and he has already signaled plans to step back from government amid plummeting public popularity and rising consumer backlash against his companies. Prominent figures in the populist wing of Trump’s coalition, such as Steve Bannon, have also denounced Musk and his peers as “technofeudal” globalists bent on turning Americans into “digital serfs.” The tech right’s alliance with Trump was always transactional, not ideological. The administration’s policies thus far—on trade, immigration, and science funding—have often run counter to the accelerationist ethos that these technologists espouse. The partnership may yet fray.
But for now, the capture is real, inverting the logic of the national champion model: where the state once directed technology firms to serve the public interest, policy is increasingly subordinated to the private objectives of technologists. Even if this doesn’t last, the damage will. In just a few months, DOGE has so hollowed out U.S. state capacity that after it is gone, private technology firms may become essential to help fill the void.
The Hybrid Future
In 2021, I posited three possible paths for our digital future: “Will we live in a world where the Internet is increasingly fragmented and technology companies serve the interests and goals of the states in which they reside, or will Big Tech decisively wrest control of digital space from governments, freeing itself from national boundaries and emerging as a truly global force? Or could the era of state dominance finally come to an end, supplanted by a techno-elite that assumes responsibility for offering the public goods once provided by governments?”
Today, the digital realm seems to be heading toward a more hybrid future—a world bifurcated into two digital spheres of influence. One pole is formed by an unmistakably more technopolar United States, where a handful of tech firms and leaders wield digital dominance, control critical infrastructure, and exert direct influence over U.S. foreign and domestic policy. These companies and the individuals who run them can manipulate the global information environment, destabilize foreign governments, and shape geopolitical outcomes. What makes this influence more potent now is that these actors boast the implicit (and sometimes explicit) backing of the American state. Foreign governments are increasingly reluctant to crack down on U.S. tech firms—not just because of their digital leverage and economic clout but also because doing so could provoke official backlash from Washington. In effect, politically endorsed components of Big Tech enjoy geopolitical impunity: shielded by the state but not accountable to it. This fusion of public and private power should allow U.S. firms to push countries to adopt their products, platforms, and standards.
The opposing pole is anchored by China and its state-capitalist model, where technology champions remain fully subordinated to the CCP. Although Beijing’s statist approach may sacrifice some long-term innovation potential and economic dynamism at the margins, it ensures that strategic technologies are aligned with national priorities. And recent breakthroughs—from DeepSeek’s latest AI reasoning models to Huawei’s CloudMatrix 384 chip cluster—demonstrate that China’s model, despite these political constraints and U.S. export controls, remains highly competitive.
Caught between these poles is Europe, once seen as a potential counterweight to the power of Big Tech. The EU has few indigenous tech giants of its own and is mired in a structural growth and productivity trap. As a result, its ability to translate regulatory ambitions into digital sovereignty is limited. Brussels faces mounting pressure to soften AI regulations for American firms and may even hesitate to tax U.S. digital service exports in response to Trump’s tariffs.
Concentrated tech power poses risks to democracy and individual freedom.
Meanwhile, the few remaining efforts at state-led and global tech governance are under siege—undermined by American Big Tech actors such as Musk and stifled by a vacuum of global leadership. As geopolitical, geoeconomic, and geotechnological fragmentation deepen, the checks on technopolar power are rapidly eroding, leaving technopolarity to grow unchecked.
The result is likely to be not a fully technopolar world but a more technopolar United States mirrored by a tightly state-controlled digital bloc in China. Most advanced industrial economies will have little choice but to align with the U.S. model, while much of the global South will find the Chinese offering more attractive.
Yet beneath their ideological differences, the American and Chinese models are converging in function. One is driven by market logic, the other by political imperatives—but both prioritize efficiency over accountability, control over consent, and scale over individual rights. In a world where authority accrues to those who control the digital space, it may matter less whether power resides in public or private hands than how effectively it can be centralized.
The great paradox of the technopolar age is that, rather than empowering individuals and bolstering democracy as early Internet visionaries once hoped, technology may instead be enabling more effective forms of hypercentralized, unaccountable control. AI and other breakthrough technologies may even render closed political systems more stable than open ones—where transparency, pluralism, checks and balances, and other key democratic features could prove liabilities in an age of exponential change. Whether lodged in governments or corporate actors, concentrated tech power poses risks to democracy and individual freedom. In 2021, I wrote that “Big Tech’s eclipse of the nation-state is not inevitable.” But it seems as if Big Tech’s eclipse of democracy, at least, has already begun.
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